Pre-grated or pre-shredded cheese is used as an essential ingredient in food preparation or added to cooked food as a complement to enhance taste. Cheese may be typically procured from the supermarket in block or grated form. The grated form of cheese, while convenient to use, contains chemicals and cellulose additives for increased shelf life and prevention of caking. Cheese shelf life and freshness diminish over time from exposure to ambient air and moisture. It is desirable to freshly grate cheese from a cheese block, which, because of its much smaller exposed surface area per unit volume of cheese compared to grated or shredded cheese in particulate form, retains its freshness for a much longer time.
Previous designs of cheese grating or shredding units for wide usage suffer from various limitations. They are typically expensive to make, require cheese in custom forms not readily available, hold small quantities of cheese, are inconvenient to use, and lack provisions for storing bulk cheese with extended shelf life for marketing of cheese packaged integrally with the grating or shredding units.
As examples, certain previous designs of grating or shredding units require the cheese to possess certain physical features, such as being split into two half-cylinders, as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,642,045, dated Feb. 15, 1972 issued to J. Buvelot, or having a hollow core at its center, as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,071,663, dated Dec. 10, 1991 issued to E. Dugan. These units generally require the block cheese to be of cylindrical geometry, which is modified to suit the grater being used. These designs are largely incompatible with the large amount of block cheese marketed by leading cheese manufacturers in the shape of rectangular parallelepipeds.
Some of the designs also require physical penetration of the cheese blocks by mechanical structures that restrain the cheese as it is grated. The force required to overcome the resistance of the cheese to being grated, when placed in contact with the grating screen and moved with respect to it, is overcome by applied forces that cause the cheese and the grating screen to move with respect to each other. These forces are typically applied manually, as in the above patents, or may be applied using an electric motor as in U.S. Pat. No. 5,364,037, dated November 15 issued to G. Bigelow. The cheese penetrating structures help transmit the externally applied forces to the cheese. These structures, however, cause wastage, since the cheese trapped in between the penetrating structures is not available to the grating screen. There is also a safety issue. The user may apply excessive force in grating the last remaining morsel of cheese and cause chipping of the penetrating elements leading to contamination of the food.
Further, as in the Buvelot patent, several of the previous cheese, or like foodstuff, grater designs require that when the cheese is grated, pressure be applied manually against the cheese to keep it in contact with the grating screen as the operator turns it relative to the cheese, causing the latter to grate. The manually applied pressure is inconvenient, variable, and non-uniform across the cheese block. This causes uneven grating and production of non-uniformly sized grated cheese particles, diminishing the aesthetics and causing variability in the flavoring of the food when cheese grating is performed directly over a food dish. Where a spring has been added to achieve application of uniform pressure on the cheese block, as in the Dugan patent, cheese rotation versus a grating screen has been achieved with an external handle mechanism increasing the complexity and cost of the unit.